pivotallabs.com Archives - 19 March 2013, Tuesday

Ian McFarland, Principal and VP of Technology for Pivotal Labs, reprises his popular RailsConf 2010 talk. Ian describes the technical and social aspects of how Pivotal practices agile software development.

I’ve been working with my client, Unpakt , for a while now. One of their core values is making people’s lives easier. They’re specifically focused on making it easy for people moving to a new home or office to find a mover, compare prices and book their move online. As a development t...

Active Record scopes are an interesting thing to test. In projects I’ve worked on, I have seen many different patterns of testing, some much better than others. A little over two years ago I wrote the gem pg_search , which provides a sort of Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for creating...

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Hi John, it’s me: future you. You think you know everything about writing software, and you’ve been told this same thing by countless others. But take it from me: you know so little you don’t even know what you don’t know. You think you’re pretty clever. You always use a language’s cu...

A/B testing is probably not worth your time. When you start hooking metrics up to your product, the feedback is addictive. All of a sudden you’ve got lots of actionable data and you’re tacking validation goals onto feature stories. This is great, but I implore you to not take it too f...

I gave a talk the other day at the Flatiron School here in NY, and had a great follow-up discussion over email with one of the students, including a number of questions about Pivotal. She and I decided to open source the discussion so everyone could see one Pivot’s thoughts on the que...

I get up in the morning, do the usual ablutions, kiss my wife and daughter, who are often still in bed, and drag myself through the crowded subway system of New York to Pivotal Labs’ offices. I’m usually early, so the people in before me are those that make the journey from “Noo Joise...

A surprising amount of simple can get an application over a number of speed bumps. We’re going to look up and down the whole application stack and use stories to show what simple things people have done to build a sustainable system without re-architecting. You’re gonna need a bigger ...

There are several reasons why you should test your Rake tasks: Rake tasks are code and as such deserve testing. When untested Rake tasks have a tendency to become overly long and convoluted. Tests will help keep them in bay. As Rake tasks typically depend on your models, you (should) ...

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We have found the Raspberry Pi to be a cost-effective replacement for the Mac minis that we use in our office to drive TVs that are information radiators. We use these radiators to display the build status of our ci (continuous integration) projects. At ~$60 (Raspberry Pi, USB WiFi, e...

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Pivotal Labs is a recognized leader in agile software development practices. We build consumer and enterprise web and mobile applications for global clients. We are currently looking for experienced, creative designers to join our team and help us continue to innovate in the field. We...

Pivotal Tracker lets you stay on top of everything to do with your project, but sometimes your stories need a little something extra. Fortunately when some of our customers feel that way, they share the results. Here’s a roundup of recent test related Third Party Tools to help you mak...

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This is the second part in a series I’m writing about lessons that can be learned from functional programming. Find the first part here . Object Oriented Programming (OOP) as an idea has been oversold. The most commonly used languages in use today are designed around the idea of OOP. ...

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic, auto-immune disease that requires constant monitoring and treatment adjustments. To fill an unmet need among patients and physicians managing RA, Crescendo Bioscience prototyped an app that would track daily conditions in hopes of facilitating better...

We’ve just released version 1.6.1 of the Pivotal Tracker iOS app , which includes fixes for a number of text input problems. Most importantly, it fixes Romaji input for Japanese users. While we don’t officially support non-English localizations, we try our best to allow Tracker to be ...

As we recently wrote , 2013 will see major improvements to Pivotal Tracker , on a rebuilt foundation (including a brand new API), followed by major new features and an updated design. We can’t wait to get all this into your hands quickly, and continuously improve Tracker based on your...

Tracker Tracker is an open source web app that allows you to see and work with stories from across multiple projects in one Kanban style view, with search and filtering. That’s huge. We have nothing else to say on the matter really. For anyone juggling multiple projects in Pivotal Tra...

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If you’re headed to Austin for SXSW join us at Adaptive Path on Sunday March 10th at 7pm for deLUX, the lean user experience party. There’ll be food and drink aplenty, and lots of great conversation. We’ll have a short speaker program featuring: Jon Berger , Pivotal Labs Jeff Gothelf ...

Today we’ve released Pivotal Tracker for iOS 1.6 to the App Store . With this release we’ve thoroughly refined the app to make updating stories easier and more enjoyable. While there are all kinds of refinements, we think you’ll be most excited about the following: All text can now be...

I woke up in the mid morning to a heavily blinded room and crept outside hoping not to wake anyone. I fumbled along the walls in a corridor of a foreign house grasping for a lightswitch which always tends to be lower in these old Sydney houses, but instead my toe found a corner. Minut...

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It’s critical that stories are accepted as soon as possible after they are delivered. Is the project manager unable to accept stores as they are delivered, so they don’t get credited in the iteration where they started? You can backdate acceptance to reflect when the stories were read...

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January has gone by quickly! Hopefully the new year is already off to a great start for you and your entire team. I’d like to share what we’ve been up to recently, and give you a preview of what to expect in 2013. The Big Picture To put our plans in context, it’s important to understa...

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With all these APIs floating around don’t you sometimes wish that apps would just talk to each other and keep us humans out of it. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close with CloudWork . It’s so straightforward I feel it’s something the Hulk might say – “Cloud Work!, Hulk no Sma...

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Pivotal Labs: We Transform Ideas into Software. As a recognized leader in highly disciplined agile software development practices, Pivotal Labs has been building high reliability software for over 20 years. We build consumer and enterprise web and mobile applications for global client...

This is the first in a series of short posts explaining what Cucumber is and isn’t. Used correctly, Cucumber can be a tool for great good. Used poorly, it’s an invitation to disaster. KNOW YOUR TOOLS. I’ve been cuking for nearly as long as cuking has been possible. I’ve made every mis...

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There is an interesting article by Swizec Teller over at Business Insider talking about why programmers do their best work late at night. This is not the case at Pivotal. Generally when we have clients committing code late at night, the team ends up having to refactor it and get tests...

We’ll come to ElementalJS a little later but first I wanted to describe the problem it’s trying to solve. The problem with current Javascript design patterns There seems to be two mainstream ways of building Javascript applications: DOM event listeners with callback spaghetti or full ...